


Until Some Other Day

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Reunited and It Feels So Good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 15:57:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18759643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: London, 1945. FOUND ROGERS STOP COMING HOME STOP H STARK STOP





	Until Some Other Day

The SSR’s headquarters in London have never been a haven for quiet or decorum. But Peggy notices that something’s off the moment she steps off the lift and into the main offices that morning; a hum of activity that reminds her of the worst of the Blitz; a frisson of tension running through the room. “Here,” Bates says, walking toward her holding a pile of manila folders. “Take these. Phillips is waiting.” There’s a message slip on top of the folders and Bates taps it with one finger. “You’re going to want to read that.”

Peggy starts to speak, but Bates is gone, the manila folders dumped in Peggy’s arms. Peggy squints at the message slip, but it’s upside down, and she juggles the folders until she can free a hand to right it.

FOUND ROGERS STOP COMING HOME STOP H STARK STOP

She drops the folders with a clatter, steps over them, and walks directly to Colonel Phillips office.

“You better not be about to swoon,” he tells her as she pushes open the door.

“Because I’ve always been the fainting type,” she says dryly, though she’s working with all her might and main to remain calm.

Phillips grunts at her, waves a hand. “With Stark’s new engines, they’ll be home by nightfall. Set up the debrief. Goddamn mess.” He huffs and shifts a folder on his desk. 

“Yes, sir.”

“And Carter.” He sighs and shakes his head. “He’s been asking for you. Comm’s’ll let you radio through.”

She permits herself one tight smile. “Thank you, sir.” And turns on her heel.

Peggy can feel the eyes of the entire department on her as she walks out of the office and calmly makes her way to the industrial urn of over-brewed tea that’s clanking and hissing its usual complaint. She’s not about to swoon, but her heart is clattering loudly, and her stomach is in knots. Every movement she makes feels suddenly surreal, divorced from the reality she’s been trying to grow used to – that Steve is gone; that she has duties and responsibilities that require attention and sometime soon, after the war is done, she’ll be able to process her loss. Very deliberately, Peggy doctors her tea with milk and a large spoonful of sugar, rationing be damned, picks up her cup and walks over to the comms room, leans against the doorframe and smiles pleasantly at Jerry, the nearest operator. “May I?” she asks.

Jerry’s haste to get out of the way is almost comical, but he pushes aside his three notepads and scattering of pencils, gestures to his chair and opens up a channel to Howard’s ship. She sets down her tea and picks up a headset, lets the familiar chatter of the call signs distract her from the prickle of panic washing over her skin, says hello to Howard, and then there’s a burst of static, a rustle of someone moving, or something being moved, and then Steve clears his throat. “Peg?”

Everything inside her collapses for a moment, and then she schools her features back into something she hopes approaches neutrality, lifts her chin and says, “I’m here.” She fiddles with the receiver she’s holding. “It’s really you?”

“Yeah, Peg.”

She feels Jerry’s hand settle gently on her shoulder, and realizes she’s crying. “Steve . . .” she manages.

And she hears the whole department break into thunderous applause. She laughs a little, accepts the handkerchief Jerry shoves toward her, and on the other end of the staticky line she can hear Steve laughing too.

\-----

It’s never really been part of Peggy’s thinking to imagine that she might be happy. She’s moved through life with her elbows out, as her grandmother once said, both jabbing others to make space for her ambitions and talents, and protecting herself against the inevitable backlash from others who couldn’t appreciate her abilities. The war opened doors to her that would have taken a great deal more battering down without it, but she would have kicked them down eventually. Still, with war, she’s found her niche – an agent who uses her fluent, boarding-school French and passable German to her advantage; who’s internalized the discreet mathematics of a tactical approach to problems from the days when she had been the problem and the world had required adjustment. She is, perhaps, satisfied with her work, but happiness isn’t a quality she’s dreamed of, never mind about pursued. Duty fits her well; responsibility allows her to know her value beyond her mother’s dreams for her of a quiet, domestic life.

That she’d known happiness since meeting Steve is an experience that took some getting used to. To discover a man who did not immediately assume she had slept her way into her position, or denigrate her, or see her as anything other than a fully-qualified agent with the right to a command was startling. Peggy’s elbows were still out. Steve stayed a puzzle – a decent man for whom Peggy’s life had not prepared her – and she lectured herself almost daily for her delight in witnessing his successes. She realized she had fallen for him just as he was strapped into Stark’s contraption for regenerating his cells, and she thought bleakly that of course she discovered her feelings when he was about to change.

But he didn’t change. His new physicality was impressive, but he was exactly the man he had been before. He remained that man for two more years, trekking through Europe with Peggy and the Commandos, and when he confessed his feelings for her one evening in a broken-down barn in north-east France, he stumbled over his words and blushed to the roots of his hair and she kissed him with an irrepressible joy she knew to be the most reckless thing in which she has ever engaged, bombings, sieges, and clandestine operations be damned.

When he died, Peggy forced herself to remember that a life of duty is a good, honorable thing, worth quashing her grief to accomplish.

To stand then, on the docks, and watch Steve disembark from Stark’s souped-up fishing vessel, two weeks after losing him, is almost more than Peggy can bear. To stand to one side, while Phillips welcomes Steve home and asks a few, brusque questions, is an interminable process. To wait to be alone with him, even after Phillips takes Stark by the elbow and steers him a discrete distance down the wharf, takes every ounce of self-control her upbringing has instilled in her. But then Steve ambles over, as if they have all the time in the world, and Peggy only realizes how much time she’s spent imagining him injured, cold, and dying when she wraps her arms around him again and he’s shockingly warm. Steve smells faintly of salt and a lot of the beaten-up leather jacket he’s wearing, but god, he’s so _warm_ \- solid, tall, and undamaged. Peggy pushes back from him just enough to be able to see his face. He looks older, somehow; she never realized how many fine lines he had beside his eyes.

“Hi,” he says, smiling, and she feels an answering smile on her own face.

“Hello,” she says back, lightheaded, breathing fast.

There are military police hovering. It’s hardly the most august place for a reunion. Everything’s damp and smells vaguely rotten, and Peggy’s sure she’s going to slip on algae if she tries to move.

“I missed you,” says Steve, and Peggy thinks how strange a thing it is to say. It hasn’t been so very long, but then Steve surely thought he was going to die, too. Cold, broken, isolated – time must have stretched and looped back on itself under those circumstances. She shivers, and he rubs a hand up and down her back.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says, hardly knowing how to put everything into words. “When I thought . . .”

“Shhhhh,” Steve murmurs.

She flinches. “If you think you get to come back and not endure my lecturing you on what a foolish, stubborn decision you made,” she says, suddenly angry, “ – putting that plane into the ice when – “

“Peg.”

“There were other options, Rogers.”

“Peggy.”

“Options that would not have meant – “

Steve leans in and kisses her then – the barest brush of his lips against hers. Peggy pulls back, her cheeks heating, and she has no idea whether to insist they kiss again or to knee him right in the balls for trying to shut her up. Steve is smiling a familiar lop-sided smile that suggests he knows exactly what she’s debating, and she has missed that smile, missed that face, and _for the love of god, Margaret_ she cannot do this here.

She swallows firmly. “We should, um . . .” She tugs the unzipped sides of Steve’s jacket together, presses her hand to his chest as she tries to ignore her jackhammering pulse. “You have to get checked out. There are questions.”

“I bet.” Steve steps back, which she expects, and catches her hand, which she does not, tugs her to follow him along the wharf to where Phillips is waiting. “Sir,” Steve says as they reach Phillips and Stark. “I’m ready.” 

Phillips looks pointedly at where Steve’s fingers are threaded with Peggy’s, and back at Steve’s face. Steve’s expression doesn’t change one whit, but he squeezes Peggy’s hand. 

“Fine,” says Phillips. He gestures towards a car and beckons two of the MPs. “Stay with these two,” he says to the men before pointing at Peggy. “You. Drive.”

_____

Peggy’s as curious as anyone to hear Steve’s story, and watches most of the debriefing through the two-way glass of the interrogation room, slips away only when needs must. She studies him, takes stock of every move of his hands, every shift in his seat. He’s answering questions with patience and grace, and for all that he knows how things work and doesn’t so much as raise an eyebrow the fourth time he’s asked why he can’t recall the exact location of his plane’s crash site, Peggy feels a growing unease. He seems pleased – quietly, solidly pleased – to be facing two MPs he’s never seen before while defending what might be termed his honor.

The interrogation takes far too long. When Peggy comes back from the bathroom to find the MPs asking Steve the same question for the fifth time she lets out an exasperated sigh. Phillips turns to look at her.

“Exactly what secrets do you imagined he sold to _which Hydra agents_ in the Arctic?” she asks, not bothering to hide her frustration.

“There are protocols,” says Phillips, blithely.

“Yes. I’m rapidly working on a protocol of my own for responding to said protocols with . . .”

“Firearms will not be necessary.” Phillips bangs on the two-way glass and the MPs quickly shove their documents into a folder and exit the room. Phillips watches Steve for a long moment. “You know what you’re doing?” he asks. 

Peggy squares her shoulders, setting aside the feeling that things are not quite right. “Sir,” she says, without commitment.

“Excellent.” Phillips turns and stands with his hands on his hips and eyes her thoughtfully. “What are you not telling me?”

“I don’t follow,” she says blithely.

“I know you, Carter. You’re thinking something.”

“I’m thinking about the fact that I haven’t eaten in six hours.”

“Sure.” Phillips brushes past her on his way to the door. “You have him back at 06.00 hours, no favors.”

“Sir.” Peggy waits until the door is closed behind him before she crosses back over to the window to look at Steve again. It’s been hours; he should be weary and disagreeable. Instead, he looks vaguely happy to be staring at cinderblock walls. “Steven Grant Rogers,” she murmurs to herself, and then turns, heads out briskly to free him up.

_____

It’s not until they’ve eaten that she’s sure of it; not until Steve has done his prodigious best to cause a food shortage in the cafeteria, taking triple helpings of powdered eggs and staring fondly - _fondly_ \- at boiled carrots that her curiosity gets the better of her. 

“What happened out there?” she asks him, catching him as he raises his water glass to his mouth. “Something’s different.”

To his credit he doesn’t spit-take or get flustered, just puts down his glass and offers her a rueful smile. “That obvious?”

“To me, yes.”

Steve nods, turns his glass between his fingers. “Not here.”

They walk, heading out into the dark, navigating their way by what light the moon can offer in the blackout. They’re silent, Steve with his hands shoved into his pockets, looking every ounce the guilty Catholic schoolboy he must once have been.

“Oh, do spit it out,” Peggy says when she can’t stand the tension a moment longer.

Steve blows out a breath. “I’m from the future.”

Peggy stops dead in her tracks and looks up into his face. “Steve,” she says, irritated.

He holds up a hand. “I know it sounds crazy.”

“It sounds . . .” She gestures helplessly. “Did you hit your head when you crashed?” While she was sure the medics on Howard’s ship had done a thorough job of checking Steve over, perhaps the serum’s healing abilities meant there were injuries that had been overlooked. 

“No. I mean, yes. But that’s not it. Peg.” Steve wet his lips. “I’m from the future.”

“And your time machine dropped you off in the Arctic,” she replies.

“Time suit,” he offers.

She sighs.

“Have I ever lied to you?” he asks.

Peggy searches his face for some inkling that this is a prank, an ill-timed, out-of-character joke he’s playing, but there’s nothing there but earnestness.

“No?” she admits, worried now. If he’s the man she knows him to be and what he’s saying is true, her life is about to become exponentially more complicated. “But I don’t understand.”

He nudges her into walking again, clearly nervous as he tells her about the ice and the seventy years spent sleeping and the future. He sketches out the barest bones of what that life has has been for him, just enough for her to mock herself for thinking Red Skull was the worst of what the world might face in her lifetime, and he shoots her glances as they walk side by side, waiting, she imagines, for her to express incredulity.

 _You have never known him lie_ she thinks, and realizes that she believes him as wholeheartedly as she’s ever done, the ridiculous sprawl of his story notwithstanding. She feels unmoored by her belief, by the logical explosion of her universe into multiverses and galaxies that are fully populated by creatures and beings she can barely comprehend – it’s dizzying to contemplate. And yet it’s not that which makes her slow her steps again until Steve slows with her. It’s the fact that he came back; the mind-bending scope of what that means – of being happy again – that has her toeing at a dandelion growing in the pavement with her shoe. She almost laughs, that these are the conditions under which she can _be_ happy.

“So.” She checks her gut sense of what needs to be done one more time before she speaks. She looks up at Steve, at the faint apprehension on his face, and decides to leap. “Do I go with you, or do you stay here?”

Steve’s mouth opens a little – a well-mannered gape. “You’d – “

“Of course.”

“I couldn’t – “

“You wouldn’t be. I offered.”

Steve steps back one pace, then forward again, determined. “If you’ll have me, I want to stay.”

“I’ll have you.” Her heart is still bruised with how much she’s missed him. Steve lifts the corner of his mouth, a half-smile, and she realizes in that moment quite how much he loves her. “Oh, Steve,” she says, and leans in happily to kiss him. She’s delighted by gentle the touch of his tongue, the heady pleasure of his mouth, the sure and steady way his hands rest at her hips. When they break apart, Steve searches her face for something.

“You really believe me,” he says at last.

“I have quite seen enough to believe there are more things in this world and out of it than I can imagine,” Peggy replies. 

“You got that right,” he offers, ruefully.

There are so many practicalities to think of. They need to discuss what to do about the Steve who’s in the ice; there’s Barnes’ location to discover; the Commandos should be reassembled if they’re going back behind enemy lines on a rescue operation. “Darling, we have so much to do,” she says, and she means shutting down Zola, rooting out the rot that is Hydra before it can take hold, but she also means making room in her life, in her arms, in her bed, for a man who came back to her out of a stubborn affection that burned for thirteen years in an impossible future.

Steve smiles knowingly, the kind of smile that used to mean they were about to bomb Nazis, or take down Hydra plants. It probably still means exactly that. “Together,” he says.

She nods, feeling warm for the first time since she lost him. “Together,” she replies, taking his hand in hers, and she tugs him back toward HQ toward a war they’re winning and another they’re about to begin.


End file.
